Reproductive Losses

The Alan Guttmacher Institute, a non profit organization recently ranked states by their access to emergency contraception. The three best were California, Washington and New Mexico. Several blue states such as Maine, New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Hawaii and reds like, Alaska, Hawaii, Texas and South Caroline are the other six states that were ranked as “good”. The remaining states were all ranked as “poor” access states. Nice job “liberal” Massachusetts and Connecticut! We didn’t expect much from Pennsyltuckey or Minnesota and we’re glad to see that politics are as usual in those states.

How many more years is it going to take to get this right? How many more years are women going to tolerate the patriarchy and the old white men whose laws are all over our bodies?

In my quixotic quest to make “Maine, New Hampshire, New York, New Jersey, Illinois, Hawaii and … Alaska, Hawaii, Texas and South Caroline” add up to “six”, I first discovered this AG report (pdf), which doesn’t rank states, but shows Massachusetts as equivalent to Washington. After that, I found this AG report, which does seem to follow what AG is saying in the “Emergency contraception” column of Table 4 (on p. 5). The only possible conclusion is that Massachusetts is very sneaky. If Massachusetts puts up ads on Craig’s List &ndash; even one of those ones that says, “I just dumped my useless crap out by the curb (a tunnel, a few muskets, Lowell, John Adams’ copy of The Da Vinci Code, Mitt Romney), come pick it up!” &ndash; DO NOT ANSWER IT! You have been warned…

Also, any personality disorders on the part of Hawaii that may implied by AG’s list can probably be explained by the fact that Hawaii has decent family planning laws but apparently refuses to fund them…